


By Any Other Name

by Kogiopsis



Category: Star Trek, Star Trek: Discovery
Genre: F/F, Female Masturbation, I have a thing about characters calling each other by titles vs names, Pining, your local asexual writes porn and doesn't know how this happened
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-06
Updated: 2017-12-06
Packaged: 2019-02-11 07:03:58
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,569
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12930033
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kogiopsis/pseuds/Kogiopsis
Summary: The first time Michael Burnham calls her Captain 'Philippa', and what comes after.





	By Any Other Name

**Author's Note:**

> Okay listen. I'm really ace and pretty sex-repulsed, so I don't know how I ended up here, but sometimes a fic needs to exist and no one else is gonna write it. So. Here it is. Enjoy?

Burnham has served on the Shenzhou for three years before she calls the Captain by her first name.  Even then, it isn’t a conscious decision - it slips out as she is trying to argue her commanding officer into resting properly after a nearly-disastrous EVA exercise.  She doesn’t even think until after she says it.

“Philippa,” she says, tone tinged with fond exasperation, and then realizes and swallows back the rest of her sentence.  Captain Georgiou laughs and waves a hand.

“You  _ can _ use my given name, Michael.  We’re friends, aren’t we?”

Burnham schools her face to blankness.

“I hope so, Captain,” she says.  Georgiou snorts.

“If you insist, then, Number One, I will heed your advice.”

“That would be the logical choice,” Burnham says smoothly, and she withdraws.

After her shift ends, sleep eludes her.  Ordinarily, Burnham is in harmony with her body, and when she rests her head on the pillow she is dreaming in moments, but not this time.  The Captain’s name echoes in her mind and hums in her lips.  The way it resonates perturbs her.  Captain Georgiou, after all, has a number of names for Michael depending on their situation; she is ‘Officer Burnham’ in an official capacity, ‘Number One’ most often on the bridge, simply ‘Burnham’ on away missions or unofficial communications.  And sometimes, in off-duty moments or the privacy of the Captain’s ready room, she is simply ‘Michael’.  It is intimate, perhaps, but an intimacy Georgiou has earned.  Has Michael earned its reciprocation?

Does she allow it of herself?

‘Captain’ has always been enough.  ‘Captain’, inflected with respect and friendship and affection over the years, has said all she needs it to say.  If ‘Philippa’ is now part of her lexicon, Michael feels she must decide what it is necessary to express.

Staring at the shadowy grey ceiling of her cabin, she purses her lips to mouth the name.  There is something… almost sensual about it.   _ Philippa _ .  The voiceless fricative, the plosive, the unrounded vowel trailing from her tongue like a sigh.  It makes her lips tingle, even without sound.  When she repeats it in a whisper, the tingle runs down her throat like a tiny spark of electricity.

Burnham closes her eyes and swallows, finding the action unusually difficult.  She imagines that the Captain’s name sits in her mouth, melting on her tongue like chocolate; that she can feel it, taste it, press the essence of Philippa Georgiou’s being against her palate.  A distant, more Vulcan part of her mind notes that her heart rate has slightly increased, her breathing become shallower.  A physical reaction to what should be a simple thing - a reaction to something about it which is not so simple.  Burnham deliberately draws in a longer, shaky breath, and then another and another until her body has calmed itself.

This bears further examination, but - not now.  Not when she needs sleep to fulfill her duty to the ship and its crew, Captain Georgiou included.  She will make time to address it at a later date.

* * *

Thoughts of the Captain - of  _ Philippa _ \- haunt her the next night, and the next.  After three nights of anxiety shortening her sleep, Burnham settles crosslegged on her bed, resigned to necessity.

She closes her eyes as if to meditate, but in truth she doesn’t need to.  The explanation is obvious, when she lets herself face it.  She feels an attraction to her Captain.  Thus the desire for intimacy, but the feeling that it is transgressive; thus the physical reaction.

And truly, it makes sense.  Philippa Georgiou is physically attractive, but more than that - she is wise and yet humorous; she is calm and collected in times of strain; she has been nothing but kind to Michael, even when Michael was not kind in return.  A parental attachment might have been expected of anyone else, but after the loss of her birth parents and Sarek’s distant, disaffected rearing, Michael has long since stopped seeking such things.  Instead - of course - her irrational mind read the Captain’s attention and warm smiles as something romantic.  And, perhaps because Michael has been celibate since her promotion to First Officer, her illogical body reacted sexually.

She slips one hand under the waistband of her sleeping attire.  On Vulcan, masturbation is treated pragmatically; Vulcan logic, after all, is an elaborate methodology to constrain the passion of Vulcan emotions, and in that sexual release can be tremendously useful.  Even Amanda Grayson, Sarek’s human wife, had been frank about it - in fact, when Michael had started puberty, Amanda had confided with a chuckle that orgasms could do wonders for cramps.  It takes little thought for Michael to achieve her first climax, and she tilts her head back afterwards and takes long, slow breaths.  On one exhalation, unthinking, she whispers the Captain’s name.

“ _ Philippa, _ ” she breathes to the empty room.  It makes her skin tingle, goosebumps rising along her arms and a feeling of electric energy pooling in her stomach.  Michael closes her eyes.  She swallows hard.  Slowly, she uncrosses her legs and lays back on the bed, stretched out fully.

“Philippa,” she says again, softly, and moves the hand between her legs in small circles, teasing her sensitized flesh to fresh arousal.  There is something amazing about the effect that a mere  _ name _ has on her.  If it were the Captain’s hand on her hot skin, the Captain’s elegant fingers stroking her - 

The thought sends a spike of pleasure through Burnham’s body and she arches her spine, throwing her head back with a gasp and that, too, becomes Philippa’s name.  Eyes still closed, she pictures Philippa above her, waves of dark hair falling against Burnham’s cheek and throat as her Captain kisses down her neck.  The hand not occupied in her underwear slides up beneath her shirt, tracing circles around her nipples even as she imagines Philippa following the same path with the tip of her tongue, and perhaps a nip of her teeth.  Burnham can practically see Philippa’s wry, fond grin - the grin she would no doubt deliver shortly before replacing her clever hands with her mouth and tongue, at the center of Burnham’s heat.

That fantasy steals her breath for a second, and she cannot help but whisper “Oh, Philippa, oh, yes, Philippa, please,” when it returns.  She changes the motion of her fingers, stroking along the axis of her body, imagining Philippa curving her tongue into Burnham’s folds in a similar path.  The thought of the Captain’s firm hands holding her thighs in place makes her muscles tense and her body torque, squirming against the very idea of restraint.  

It has been long enough since she had a sexual partner - indeed, since sex was more than mechanical relief at all - that Michael had all but forgotten the delicious headiness of it.  Not just the physical pleasure, but the negotiation and trust, surrender and vulnerability.  She would walk into fire for Philippa Georgiou, wound withstand the vacuum of space for her, but that’s not all.  For Philippa, Michael Burnham would let fall her Vulcan mask, her near-complete control.  For Philippa she would bare her heart as well as her body and give both over completely, that her Captain might do whatever she pleased.

Breath coming in short bursts, Michael twists until she is lying on her stomach, arms pinned between her heated skin and the thin sheets.  She rolls her hips against her hand, seeking  _ pressure _ , and the wave of pleasure that rolls through her makes her jaw clench.  A keening noise escapes her throat, muffled in her pillow.  Again, and again - the heel of her palm presses into her slickness, her fingers sliding further back to tease at her entrance.  With her other hand, Michael grabs her right breast and squeezes, short nails scraping tender skin.  Her nerves are so alight with stimulation that even that slight pain feels like pleasure.  Panting open-mouthed, she curls two fingers into her own tight heat, sliding them in and out first slowly, then with increasing speed.

Orgasm undoes her, her muscles going slack at the first shock of it.  Michael melts into her bed, trembling and limp.  She tries to steady her heartbeat with deep breaths, but can’t maintain it; instead, she rolls onto her side, drawing her hands to her chest, and closes her eyes.  The room smells of sex and a little of sweat - only now is Michael aware of the strands of hair plastered to her forehead, the line of coolness along her spine where perspiration evaporates.  In the blackness behind her eyelids, she can imagine that the sweat is not hers alone: that Philippa lies next to her, a mirror image of languid contentment, a soft half-smirk on her face.  What would it be like, Michael wonders, to have Philippa Georgiou under her hands, gasping and needy and beautifully disheveled?  What old scars might she find to trace and tenderly kiss?  What words could they whisper to one another, softly, in the afterglow?

After a time she can’t quite measure, Michael gets up and washes her hands and thighs at her tiny lavatory unit.  She leans into the mirror, cool against her still-warm forehead, and this time the deep breaths come more easily.

“Philippa,” she whispers one more time, soft and half-broken.

The name is still strange and sacred on her tongue, but even so, it is easier to say  _ Philippa _ than it is to say  _ I love you _ .


End file.
